When you browse on the Internet how long do you normally wait for a website to load? At the most, 10 seconds, right? Well, if so, you are one of the few as most of the users would not wait even for 8 seconds. And yes, it is the same for your website too. It might have the most interesting and informative content and most attractive images, but if it doesn’t load as soon as a user clicks the link, these content and images and animations are of no use as nobody would see them.

So, what can you do about it? If you are a webmaster you’d know that most of the search engines consider website speed while ranking a page. This is a blessing and a bane for you depending on which side of the line you are. If your site loads faster it gets an upper hand over all others that loads slower. Whereas, if it loads slower you are in for trouble as your site might not even be seen by users.

Website speed becomes a crucial issue if your website is an e-commerce site, or in other words, if you do your business through your online presence. If you find your website becoming listed among those slow loading sites, well, it is time to wake up and do something about it. So first of all, what is a slow loading website? Today, if a website takes more than even 2 seconds it is considered to be a slow loading site. So you know how important it is to get it faster and smarter. Let’s check out a few ways in which you can make a website load faster.

Get a fast server host

Most of the shared hosting servers are cheaper but slower as well due to high traffic. Hence, if you find your site getting slower and slower to load its time you change the hosting server. The best option would be to get an independent one or go for lesser known ones.

Use fewer images for your web pages

An image-heavy page can take time to load. Same is the case for a page with Flash and animations. For a site that sells a product it could be difficult to lessen the number of pages. However, fewer images can make your site load faster. Even reducing the resolution can make a difference to the site, even if it is that of milliseconds.

Use external Java

Javascript can slow down your site for many seconds. Of course, you cannot help using Java and what you could do here is to externalise it so that viewers find it after the page is loaded.

All these methods can increase the website loading speed considerably; however, at the same time you cannot simplify your website so much that no user is interested to browse it. Also, if it is an e-commerce site you’ll definitely have images of products that you cannot help adding. There are in fact many ways in which you can keep up the speed while making the page attractive. Check out a few of the methods here – http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html.